After telling myself to stop buying guitars I saw this locally on the Mac Bid auction site - which for those who don’t know they resell product returns from companies like Amazon and Walmart etc. Buying from them is a bit of a crapshoot. Anyway I saw this pop up and was intrigued - these IYV Mostrite guitars are almost always sold out on Amazon, so in an unfocused moment I bid and won it for $140 (LOL). Luckily it turns out the guitar was in great shape and looked virtually unplayed. It comes with what looks to be two P90 pickups which don’t sound half bad.
It has a mahogany body with no blemishes in the black finish that I can see. The neck feels good with a light gloss finish. It’s a 24.75” scale and medium jumbo frets that were installed well with no fret sprout or sharp ends. The tuners are decent. It has a 1.69” nut width and is .85” thick at the first fret. There is nice access to the upper frets. It has somewhat of a flat fretboard radius - at least 14”
Cons:
The frets were scratchy and in need of a polish - this was an easy fix.
The hardware is cheap and executed poorly. For example:
The nut is plastic and not cut well. Just breathing on the guitar knocked it out way of tune. I replaced it with a Graphtech nut and things are much better.
The bridge is a cheap roller style and due to the sharp break angle of the strings the D string was hitting the saddle adjustment screw. Luckily the saddle is easily reversible so the problem was solved and once the bridge was adjusted and secured down it seems to work pretty well.
The tremolo is a cheap bigsby knockoff and was initially awkward to use. The handle seemed to bind up when rotated and sat too high and was difficult to push down. I adjusted the tension screw on the arm and replaced the spring with a bigsby 7/8” one and now it functions just fine.
The pots and switch are the typical cheapo variety, but they seem to work well.
So in summary this IYV mosrite-type guitar is inexpensive, looks pretty cool, but needs some set-up to get it where it’s comfortably playable. After the set-up work it’s kind of fun. I believe hardware upgrades will take it up to another level. I’m not sure what my plans are for it just yet. I hope this helps someone who has an interest in this model. Here's a link to pictures ( hopefully).
IYV Mosrite Pics